Urban Notebook

Pretend that you are governing a declining American city. You’ve probably witnessed numerous public service failures, like slow-responding police, unclean streets and polluted waterways. Among these failures, your city may also not be fully regulating its businesses, meaning that some are breaking minor laws or even operating under the table. Should it be, then, your top priority to make them comply?

In Detroit, it certainly seems it is. In 2011, the city launched Operation Compliance, an initiative that was meant to address 1,500 illegal businesses by shuttering hazardous ones and modernizing others. After one year, 535 businesses had agreed to come into compliance and 383 had been closed, often on zoning technicalities. Since then, Detroit has continued charging fines and conducting random searches.
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I live in Houston and I don’t own a car. I know, I know: If there is a more hard-to-believe statement to make about any American city with a straight face, I don’t know what it is. But it’s true.

Last fall, after three decades of living in Southern California, I moved to Houston to take over Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. I had given up my car a few years ago, and now I was moving to the most sprawling, car-centric city in America, a place where well over 90 percent of all residents drive to work in automobiles. Houston is twice the size of New York City, with only a quarter of the population -- and that’s just the central city, not counting the suburbs.
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In a world-class city, one might expect that the prime commercial corridor would also be a model public space. But this hasn’t been the case for the downtown stretch of Market Street at the heart of San Francisco. For decades it has doubled both as a traditional main street and an automobile thruway. This combination has harmed aesthetics and produced a dangerous clash of transportation modes. Now, the city’s transportation agency is addressing the problem.

San Francisco, after years of planning, launched this fall the Safer Market Street plan, which designates transit-only lanes, prohibits turns at certain intersections and posts better signage, among other things. The idea is to reduce automobile traffic on a street where 84 percent of the people arrive by foot, bicycle or transit.
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For a few years now, a handful of cities have been trying to position themselves as more immigrant-friendly communities. At a time when some states have adopted tougher immigration laws that can make them less welcoming to foreign-born residents, cities like Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, have actively been trying to attract immigrants in the hope they’ll help drive new economic growth.

Newly elected mayors like to be judged, and generally are judged, on the breadth of their vision. They march into office following campaigns in which they promise to produce world-class schools, dramatic new efficiencies in management and spectacular economic development. They deliver inaugural speeches proclaiming that, given enough energy and creativity, no goal is unreachable.

When they leave office, however, it is a different story. By then, the public and most of the pundits have lost track of what the original promises were, and judge mayors on how well they handled the details -- clearing away snow, repairing the streets, keeping municipal employees on the job and a myriad of other administrative challenges far beneath the lofty rhetoric of Inauguration Day.
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